We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.
Austin Kleon — We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its… 10:05am on April 6, 2019We are encouraged to believe in our dreams, but we are assumed to dream in the same limited palette as everyone else.
The Miracle of the Mundane 9:22am on April 6, 2019Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people I find myself drawn to work with and stay close to. People who have figured out who they are and are good at being that on purpose.
On solitude, and being who you are 2:33pm on February 16, 2019Stay woke just means pay attention to everything, don’t lean on your own understanding or anyone else’s, observe, evolve, eliminate things that no longer evolve. That’s what it means. Stay conscious, stay awake. It doesn’t mean judge others. It doesn’t mean gang up on somebody who you feel is not woke.
The woke shop 2:33pm on February 16, 2019Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.
AUSTIN KLEON : BLOG : Posts tagged \’Walking\’ 11:34pm on February 8, 2019At the same time that “self-made” entered the nation’s lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode — “I made a failure,” a merchant would say after losing his shop — “failure” in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase “I feel like a failure” comes to us so naturally today “that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.”
5 thoughts on self-help 5:12pm on August 23, 2018Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet, in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps.
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan W. Watts 11:51am on August 19, 2018Women are slaves to the fashion game with its basic rule, “I have conformed sooner than you.”
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan W. Watts 11:51am on August 19, 2018You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan W. Watts 11:50am on August 19, 2018Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan W. Watts 11:50am on August 19, 2018At times, the paper-work, recording what has been done, seems to become more important than what it records. Students’ records in the registrar’s office are often kept in safes and vaults, but not so the books in the library—unless extremely rare or dangerous.
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan W. Watts 11:49am on August 19, 2018I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver 11:49am on August 19, 2018For the universe is full of radiant suggestion.
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver 11:49am on August 19, 2018Man’s most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering.
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver 11:48am on August 19, 2018There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true.
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver 11:48am on August 19, 2018I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver 11:48am on August 19, 2018Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver 11:48am on August 19, 2018In the afterlife, in the warm company of His accidental subjects, God now settles in comfortably, like a grandfather who looks down the long holiday table at his progeny, feeling proud, somehow responsible, and a little surprised.
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman 11:47am on August 19, 2018“Perhaps we could warm you up with a simpler situation,” he considers. “How would you like to be in a closed room, one-on-one with your lover?” And then you are here. You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else. “Thank you,” you tell the angel. “This I’m used to.”
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman 11:46am on August 19, 2018When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed.
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman 11:45am on August 19, 2018